September 2025

Published on September 1, 2025.

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Rivers Heritage Site Apple Day - Saturday 4 October, 2025 10 - 3.

What happens on Apple Day? Think of it as a festival.

In the early morning it is quiet in the Orchard. The trees, weighted with unusual traditional varieties of apples, and the paths, weaving through the summer grasses, stand ready.

Then people start coming - young and old, with families or on their own - bringing bags to take home their favourite apples for pies and cakes and apple sauce or to bite into then and there! Or at the entrance they pick up the long handled pickers to reach high to grab the green, red and gold globes. It has been very dry this year but the harvest is good: there have been great numbers of different varieties of plums and the branches are bending from the weight of apples and pears.

The picking sticks wave about madly like arms in front of Glastonbury stages, reminding us of the singing that set the trees growing at January, at the Wassail celebration.



Picking sticks wave around to the remembered wassail songs like arms before a festival stage. You must bend under the weighted branches to walk along this path.

Wander about - get your unknown apples identified, discuss the 300 year history of the Orchard site. Eat apple cakes, buy the deeply purple jam made from Rivers plums, and apple sausage rolls. Read up in the September article about Rivers volunteers’ choices of favourite fruit. Look for the Cox’s Orange Pippin, the Emneth Early, the Laxton Superb volunteers describe, as well as finding so many others including Bramleys and Russets. Take home the apples you’ve chosen for yourselves and while tasting, let them inspire your own fragrant cooking. Thank you for picking for juicing so that the hundreds of bottles of Rivers apple juice we produce can be sold to support the Orchard and its maintenance.



The muted gold of the russet becomes a spicy crisp crunch as you bite into the creamy flesh. Cox’s Orange Pippins, beloved by many, glow from their leafy branch.

Children’s Art Competition Open Day - calling all children and parents!

The Competition Organiser, Lanier Pole, will be at Apple Day to show examples of children’s art and to give you some fun ideas of what to paint, draw, or take photos of for your entries.

For full details of Apple Day and the Art Competition see the Rivers 300 website.



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